Then Mr. T. P. Cooke, when he pitches his voice in a low falsetto, hitches his trowsers, says, “My dear eyes! what! Sewsan!” and affirms that “no true heart is altered by the gilt swabs on the shoulders, but is ever open to the cry of a female in distress.” Possibly the next will be Mr. Paul Bedford, when he rolls his _r_ and says, “Come along, my r-r-r-r-rummy cove; come along comealong-comealong! how are you? how d’ye do? here we are! I’m a looking at you like bricksywicksywicksies—I believe you my boy-y-y-y-y!” And directly afterwards he turns up his nose with his forefinger, and looks like Mr. Wright, as he exclaims, “Come, I say you know, guv’nor, none o’ them larks eh! you didn’t ought to was.” All these are sure to be received with the greatest enthusiasm: and as he usually gives the name of the actor he is about to imitate, before he commences, he is spared the unpleasantry attendant upon the remark of some guest, who says “Capital! famous! it’s Keeley himself,” when the ingenious Gent is attempting an impersonation of Farren. But after all his surest card is Buckstone. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IX. OF GENTS ON THE RIVER THE grand gathering of Gents is only to be met with as one universal réunion of all their varieties, on board the Sunday steamboats. No city in the world produces so many holiday specimens of tawdry vulgarity as London: and the river appears to be the point towards which all the countless myriads converge. Their strenuous attempts to ape gentility—a bad style of word, we admit, but one peculiarly adapted to our purpose—are to us more painful than ludicrous: and the labouring man, dressed in the usual costume of his class is, in our eyes, far more respectable than the Gent, in his dreary efforts to assume a style and tournure which he is so utterly incapable of carrying out. [Illustration] When joining a steamboat excursion the Gent never sits on the regular benches placed for that purpose. He prefers the top of the cabin-door—the steps of the paddle-boxes—the platform on which the steersman is elevated, and the like situations. Here you may always see him with a newspaper and a bottle of stout, a light blue stock, and, being Sunday, a very new hat, and a pair of white trowsers: with Berlin gloves, which he carries in his hand. For, indeed, not being used to them, nothing presents so perfect an idea of tolerated discomfort as a Sunday Gent in a pair of gloves. We can only compare the appearance of his hands, when suffering under the infliction, to those of a Guy Fawkes, or the tailors’ dressed-up dummies before alluded to. [Illustration]